Janice Pottker had a serious interest in the way society worked -- she had a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia -- when she started out as a writer. Her first two books, coauthored with her husband, Andrew Fishel, had been academic, "Sex Bias in the Schools," and "Sex Discrimination in Education." In Washington, where her husband wound up as a senior official at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), she began work as a sociologist in the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. She didn't leave her concerns behind in the office, either: Galled by a local dry cleaner's double standard of charging women $2.25 to clean blouses that were similar to the shirts that men paid only 95 cents to have cleaned, she joined with another woman to file complaints with the local county human rights commission. Their protest was written up in the Washington Post.

Soon, she began to pursue writing full time, showing a knack for unauthorized biographies. In 1987 she published "Dear Ann, Dear Abby," on the two sisters who became renowned advice columnists. The book sold 200,000 copies. Family dynasties intrigued her. She began profiling them for a book she would call "Born to Power," which eventually included a chapter on the Felds, adapted from her magazine story.

In that article, Pottker wove what was, for the most part, an inspiring tale of Irvin Feld's origins as a little boy in the 1920s selling nickel bottles of snake oil at two for a dollar at traveling carnivals in rural Maryland, through the mid-1980s, when his global entertainment company employed 2,500 people, including Siegfried and Roy, with revenues approaching $260 million a year. The feisty entrepreneur had cracked the Forbes 400.

Feld's knack for making serious money blossomed early, when he and his brother Israel came to Washington in 1938 and opened a novelty store in a predominately black part of the city. Two years later Irvin plunked down $500 to open the Super Cut-Rate Drugstore downtown, and hung speakers outside to blare pop tunes and gospel songs at passersby. "I knew blacks liked music and records," he was quoted as saying.

But that was only the beginning. The drug store was soon followed by record stores, and then his own recording company, which specialized in black acts. The budding impresario then originated the idea of outdoor summer concerts, and later indoor concerts with air conditioning, to promote his recording acts, showing up to take charge in his trademark crimson jackets and garish ties, and screaming orders with his ever-present cigar and diamond pinkie ring fluttering in the air. Soon, Feld was booking acts from Chubby Checker to the Big Bopper to a teenage Paul Anka in all kinds of major venues. Then, in 1956, he finally got his lifelong wish: buying a share of the near-bankrupt Ringling Bros. circus. In 1967, for $8 million, he got it all.

In 1984, after dramatic ups and downs including his forced sale of the circus to Mattel for two years, one of the greatest showmen on earth died in his sleep. The headline in the New York Times called him, "The Man Who Saved the Circus."

Overall, Jan Pottker crafted a moving story arc out of Irvin Feld's "chills and spills." But there were dark passages, too.

Irvin Feld, she reported, had made little effort to conceal his homosexual affairs. His wife Adele, evidently blaming herself for her husband's lack of affection, had committed suicide in 1958. "Adele blamed herself for Feld's inattention; if she were prettier or sexier, she reasoned, he'd be happy and their marital problems would be solved," Pottker wrote, keeping her sources for this information hidden from the reader. "After faking a marriage for a dozen years, she realized that there was only one way out."

The two Feld kids, Ken and Karen, had been shlepped off to live with an aunt while their father traveled the world. Meanwhile, their father continued an open relationship with a man until 1981 when, according to Pottker, "a bullet had lodged in the spine of his longtime companion and company assistant after a shooting outside a gay bar on P Street."

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